Special Issue: Part 4  

 (Un)Common Landscapes and Ruptured Memories: Auto-ethnographies of North Bengal

Walls: The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth

                                                             By Sumana Roy

"Engineering colleges are anthropological curiosities."

Five years ago, I began teaching at the Humanities department in a government engineering college in Jalpaiguri, a district town in North Bengal, India. ‘Engineering English’ was the brief given to me on my first day at the job. That course, its syllabus set by a controlling technological university in Calcutta, was itself an anthropological inheritance I could do without: in the course of a semester I was to produce English-speaking engineers who would be linguistically equipped to work for richer economies in the West.

The majority of my students were second and third language English users. They were more scared of the preposition than I had ever been of Integral Calculus. Every classroom encounter brought some new blooper, every corridor conversation a self-critique. Increasingly frustrated with the near non-existent role of the Humanities in the ideating technology of my students and colleagues from the engineering sciences, I would gradually have to get used to a new kind of marginalization. A few months into my job, I, perhaps to avoid the curious gaze of what in my mind was the beehive of the non-humanities, found myself observing the walls of classrooms and corridors and toilets and offices of the institute. It might have also been the metaphor turning literal: I was letting walls grow around me.

Fig.1, 2: The scribbling over walls

It wasn’t the writing on the walls alone that made me feel like a creature from another planet. All around me were signs, geometrical figures, letters and numerals, arranged in such a way that what must have been a meaningful code to engineers began to look like installation art and cave paintings to me.

             

                                        

  Fig. 3,4 & 5:  The Wall Circuits....

When I discovered ‘Integrate the World’ written on a broken switchboard by students of the Electronics and Communications Engineering department, the phrase began to sound like a pop idiom. 

Fig. 6: The Wall is Integrated...

Or a series of nuts and bolts, rusty and perhaps of no use, nailed into the skin of the wall, began to walk in my dreams: it resembled a centipede.

Fig. 7: The Centipede 

The college is now fifty years old, and it wears its history on its walls. Not in commemorative plaques, but in the sketches of monsoon moss that refuses to leave its walls. Like many government buildings that run on the bureaucratic psychology of nothing-can-be-thrown, old switch boxes, their intestines exposed, remain nailed to walls. Those damp faces on the walls, broken apparatuses, electric lines in ruins, mathematical equations scribbled on walls as aid to writing examinations, missing letters from words, broken pipes hanging from bureaucratic signs, fire extinguishers hanging from walls like baby kangaroos from pouches – this was a new world, a new found land. 

Fig. 8,9,10,11 & 12:  The Wall tells a different tale every time....

Fig. 13, 14 & 15: The Wall aids....

Fig. 16:  The Nature's impression over Wall 

It was not the walls inside the college alone which carried the secular stigmata of alienation. I found that the walls outside were no less curious. On the walls of a building officially marked ‘abandoned’, someone, in all likelihood a student, had carved a love story with hearts and initials of the lover; in another place was an advert for instant noodles which said ‘Seasoning inside’, as if inside the wall. 

Fig. 17 & 18: Loving the Wall, Inside.....

And just outside the campus, I found the strangest wall I’ve ever encountered: a message saying that Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, the Indian freedom fighter said to have died in an air crash in 1945, would return as ‘the leader of the nation, may be the world’.

Fig. 19:  The Wall declaration of Netaji...

I cannot exactly say what led me to begin photographing these walls. What kind of documentation of my psychological life was I aiming for? I knew I wasn’t aiming for prettiness. So when I was ‘caught’ photographing walls, I was often made to feel like a spy. ‘A wall, seriously? You find this worth photographing?’ 

Fig. 20, 21, 22 & 23:  The Wall Codes...

I’d be taunted from time to time, by students and colleagues. It would leave the administration uneasy, their lacks written on the wall as it were. Sometimes I found myself wondering about what my students thought of my fetish. I found the answer one afternoon when a young boy, not more than twenty, came and asked me, ‘Is this what the Humanities does – treat unimportant things like walls as important?’. In response, I asked him to pose for me in a photograph, a wall magazine to his left.

All of this together bred a disciplinary isolation in me. In them was the resounding moral: The geek shall inherit the earth. The walls became versions of Lines of Control. Until one day, while driving out of the campus, I found a red wall painted with the words ‘Open Happiness’. It was an advert for Coca Cola, and as if by a miraculous coincidence, I found a young schoolgirl pass by with an open umbrella. And I suddenly became both: the girl and the wall.

Fig. 24: The Wall opens to happiness....

Author’s Bio- Note:

Sumana Roy writes from Siliguri, a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal. She can be contacted  at www.sumanaroy.com 

 Special Issue: Part 3  

 (Un)Common Landscapes and Ruptured Memories: Auto-ethnographies of North Bengal

North Bengal University Campus As I Saw it

                                                                 

                                                                      by Sinjini Roy

I was born in NBU campus and spent the first seventeen years of my life over here. I moved out of the university campus when I had to go to Kolkata for my graduation (which I did from St. Xavier’s college) and for my Masters (from JNU). But I am back again to the campus after a break of five years. My parents were in the university and I never missed an opportunity to come home in the summer or in puja vacations. Coming home by train or air has always been a special occasion filled with inexplicable joy.

Early in my childhood I started noticing the sprawling campus and its serene beauty which used to change its texture, colour, and flavour every season. Nowhere else I noticed such distinctive presence of all the six seasons. What left a deep impression in my mind are thousands of Jonakis lighting off and on, sheuli-fragrance in the autumn mornings, the fragrance of kadam and bakul flowers in the summer months and in early monsoon, the free-flowing streams descending down from the hills on the North, flowing through different directions of the campus before meeting river Magurmari,  jarul, sonajhuri, kathalchapa, swarnachapa, kamini, kanakchapa, palash, kurchi, bottle-brush, krishachura, and many other wild flowers adding colours to campus in different seasons. Sadly, new buildings have replaced the widespread kashfool bush, which signalled the approach of Durga puja in every autumn. Besides, the hills in the background, the saalbagan at the centre of the campus, Padmaja park and rose-garden in front of the administrative building, the rubber and tea plantations on the northern outskirt were the other highlights of the beautiful university campus.

I had a few friends in the neighbourhood and had a lot of time and opportunity to play with them. In the summer vacation we used to fix a swing in the hanging branch of a mango tree close to our house and that was a major point of attraction to my friends. We also had a huge interest in the raw mangoes that hung over our heads but we had to take the help of our parents to get hold of them.

Changes in the campus are difficult to go unnoticed. In my childhood I noticed that a large majority of the students in NBU used to come from the six districts of North Bengal and not too many from the hills. A large majority of the students were from vernacular and rural backgrounds and many bearing traces of poverty in their appearance and existence. In the 1990s salwar kurta had replaced saree as the favoured dress. The girls were yet to catch up with jeans and makeovers in the beauty parlours and were less figure-conscious. These days we get to see a strong presence of hill students with English medium background and a lot more students conversing in English and Hindi. Students in general wear jeans, tea shirts of branded make and look to be in tune with the latest fashions. They appear figure conscious, if not health conscious; visit to gyms and use of cosmetics; use of essence is quite common. The number of hill students has increased over the years and they, with good school and college education, do very well in terms of academic performance. Quite interestingly they are the most well dressed section visible on campus with branded clothes, colourful shoes, varieties of hand bags and unique hair styles. They have become significant eye catchers in the campus.

Second noticeable change has been the changing food culture on the campus. Earlier, there was hardly any food shop, excepting the students’ canteen and the law canteen, which offered very limited, repetitive snacks like chop, singara, ghugni, and egg omelette. But now, besides the teachers’ canteen, students’ canteen and employees’ canteen a large number of mobile snacks shops have come up which offer a large variety of snacks like papri chat, chur mur, jhal muri, phuchka,  ghugni, singara, momo, butter-toast, puri-sabji, chops of different kinds, chowmein, pokoda  and the list continues. Even in the Shibmandir Bazar area which is five minutes’ walk from the campus one can explore a whole lot of food stalls and street vendors selling mouth watering snacks, fruit juice, and a whole range of snacks made of chicken, fish, egg and mutton. Keeping in mind the growing number of hill students, shops have come up with the delicacies like thuppa, soup, momos, phuyang, and noodles.

Third important change has been the demise of the adda culture. I still remember when I was in class seven or eight I used to stroll around the campus with my friends in the evening. During our leisurely walk I could see that groups of boys and girls, mostly university students, sitting in front of hostels or beside Arts faculty busy chatting, gossiping and laughing their hearts out. Such addas, or public debates continued until dinner time, when the girls had to return to their hostels. Watching them enjoying hours of adda I used to get jealous. Away from home and free of parents’ surveillance they could mix freely and talk on any issue under the sun whereas we did not have that kind of freedom. What made us more envious is the fact that the students were not under any compulsion to get back to their rooms and sit down to study at 6:30. Teachers too had their regular sessions of adda in teachers canteen; supposedly such addas were creative and refreshing.

Now when I go for my evening walk on the campus I don’t see the groups of students and teachers engrossed in adda. Sal Bagan is heavily fenced and nobody is allowed an entry inside. The pagoda inside the Sal Bagan, which was once the epicentre of cultural activities and university convocation, now appear uncared. Now watching campus evenings minus adda makes me very pensive.

Earlier the campus inmates were bound by a sense of campus solidarity; the neighbours used to visit each other on every family occasion, or on weekends for dinner. A lot of our neighbours used to come to our house spent hours discussing politics, issues related to university administration, over several rounds of tea. There was a vibrant women’s association which used to run a library, organize an annual fete in the Vidyasagar Manch, organise important events like picnic, Rabindra Jayanti, and so on. Apart from the women members the association was a huge source of attraction for the campus children. Sadly, the association does not exist anymore.

I have been a serious student of Rabindra sangeet right from my early childhood and I used to participate in Rabindra Jayanti celebrations which were organized with great enthusiasm.  There used to be a Pravat pheri (morning procession), where the participants had to sing Rabindra sangeet and recite poems of the Visva Kabi, followed by a cultural programme in the pagoda inside the Sal Bagan. I used to perform in all these programmes along with the senior and junior artists carefully selected from within the campus. But these days such programmes are organized mechanically and I am not even informed about the programme. These are small changes which hurt me deep.

Fourth, there has been a clear change of taste which is apparent in selection of items in the annual cultural programme organized by the Students’ Asssociation. Earlier, Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrul Geeti, the dance-dramas of Rabindranath, folk songs and dance, Ganasangeet,, classical vocal and instrumental music, play by reputed groups (like Tritirtha of Balurghat) used to be a part of all the annual cultural programmes. But now, one can see the predominance performances by musical bands, and songs and dance items based on Hindi films. Earlier, not only the students, even professors across the Departments used to watch these programmes that ran until late night.  But with the change of taste, teachers and their family members do not attend such cultural events.

Notwithstanding the negative changes, which are of course man-made, it is difficult not to remember the sweetest childhood memories and the serene beauty that the campus and its Himalayan background offer. The natural ambience and all the positive sides of campus life definitely have left a deep impression on the persona that I am.  Even today when I take a leisurely walk on the campus I get filled with all positive vibes and feel relieved of all tensions and anxieties of life. I am not sure if I will be here on the campus for the rest of my life but I can tell for sure that there will never be a mental/spiritual break with the life I have lived here and with the memories which I preserve with greatest care.

Author's Bio- Note:

Sinjini Roy is currently a doctoral fellow at North Bengal University. Earlier, she completed her Masters in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.